On Thursday, longtime Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, a Pelosi ally and fellow Californian, announced he would retire at the end of this Congress. That closely follows Rep. George Miller’s (D-Calif.) decision to also leave the House at the end of the year.

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While Democrats should hold both seats, the departures put more districts in play. Perhaps more important, the retirement of two Pelosi friends — both of whom would be chairmen in a Democratic majority — bolsters the GOP argument that their grip on the House is solid.

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden (Ore.) called Waxman’s retirement a “clear indication … that the House Democrats don’t think they’re going to be wielding the gavels next time.”

The NRCC will use the Miller and Waxman retirements to raise money and lean on business groups and wealthy donors to back GOP candidates, arguing that the writing is already on the wall for Election Day and they’d better get on the winning side now.

Pelosi was even forced to deny rumors on Thursday that she too was retiring. More than a dozen Democrats called her personally to find out what was going on after a story speculated she might step down.

“I’m running. I’ve already started the paperwork process. My work is not finished,” Pelosi said in a statement.

The fact that Pelosi has to take time to swat this kind of speculation shows how bad things have gotten for House Democrats in the past few weeks.

Democrats deny that the retirements have anything to do with the party’s bleak outlook in the House.

“I don’t accept the idea that Democrats won’t get the House back,” Waxman said. “I think that the Republicans have nothing to offer. They’re against everything. They’re against everything Obama wanted. They have no alternatives on health care policy. They have nothing to say, they have nothing to offer.”

“I don’t think these retirements are driven by these kind of calculations,” added John Lawrence, Pelosi’s former chief of staff and a longtime Miller aide. “I would not infer a scintilla of connection between their expectations for the fall and for what I think is profoundly personal decision that 40 years [in office] is long enough.”

Pelosi, for her part, isn’t losing faith that victory in November is possible. She’s grown fond of telling this joke to Democratic members in recent weeks:

At the end of the Cold War, American and Soviet spies just couldn’t stop spying on each other. So they decided to have a contest in one year to prove who were the better spies. They settled on a dog fight. A year later, the Soviets had raised a vicious pit bull; the Americans countered with a meek-looking dachshund. Seeing the dachshund, the Soviets were confident of victory. But once the fight started, the dachshund mauled the pit bull. The Soviets were stunned. The Americans responded: “While you were raising that awful dog, starving it, teaching it to be mean, we were figuring out how to disguise an alligator as a dachshund.”